V-2nd - Chapter 10: Partridge in a Pear tree

[Michael Bailey]

alice wellintown  wrote:
> The slab and esther scene is, obviously, a perverse reflection of the
> sphere ruby scene. Is the sphere and ruby scene also perverse and is
> it subjected to Pynchon's satire?

oh heck yes!

>Does sphere keep cool? does his
> j-press suit and fancy car remind us that Rachel's daddy wears j-press
> (I used to have closet full of them, my ex was a wall street bond
> trader) and Rachel drives that fancy car her daddy pays for? what of
> his comments about white boyz? he's selling and they are buying; he's
> buying ruby here. or is she just giving it to him for free cause he
> can play that feel inside her?

yeah, c'mon, do you find your tongue, via sympathetic magic as you
read that bit, creeping between your molars in search of your cheek?
I can just about buy Rachel's curiosity about Benny's "boy's world
that she'll never see" but this is Ruby earning her hire, isn't it?

>and, whatz with all the disguises and
> phony red-light trappings? can't the man love her in public? maybe
> that bird, that ornate byrd just gonna go and fly into that gargoyle,
> impale himself on that pole, hand his own ass cause he's strange
> fruit.
>

I was gonna say, mebbe it has something to do with the brothel origins of jazz
- somehow an art form outside the pale except maybe in New Orleans;
and while it's fitting that, feeling underappreciated by his actual
audience that night, he's fishing Ruby for compliments, still the
dynamism is a dissatisfaction (which to his credit Sphere dispels by
delving at least a little into Ruby's personal life)

Mark Kohut wrote:
>> I have been visited by a spontaneous thought on my own post,
>> my self-closed ouroborous loop

Glenn Scheper, thy thesis is not forgotten!


>>speaking to me like madmen hear...
>> Slab, whose art here is satirized of course, dismisses Esther superiorly for
>> finding "allegory' in his art. We know that multi-layered Resonance Writer TRP
>> works in allegorical plus modes. I.E. NOT one-to-one correspondence
>> allegory but layers of real world ramification beyond the words themselves---the
>> art thing itself.
>>

Sphere's the poet, Slab's the lunatic, Roony's the lover?

>> So, Slab's comic Cheese Danishes Thing In Itself is a chaste art?---without
>> relationships, w/o sex,
>> without a contamination from life and life only as Bobby D. is always saying?
>>
>> Slab's art is NOT Pynchon's idea of art, his work full of sex, relationships and
>> allegorical resonances.
>>
>> ???

Slab's allegory isn't mechanically sound.  While Pynchon may not be a
full-fledged rocket scientist a la von Braun, he's closer than I'll
ever likely get (that "likely" is pure unabashed egotistical optimism)
and his allegories, eg the balloon-tree-screwdriver dream, are a lot
better-constructed:
a) rates of change completely different for the fruiting cycle of the
tree, the growth of the tree, and the appetite of the bird
b) more importantly, surely the bird will fly away at first gargoyle-graze